Lot’s of us are still doing most of their work from home. Especially in the IT business, this practice is commonplace. When you have a computer and a internet connection available, you can basically do everything as when you are present in the office.
When having meetings or calls with Microsoft teams, it would be nice to let your housemates know that you are busy, to avoid uncomfortable situations … for both parties.
The setup
When Microsoft teams on my laptop is in meeting/call mode, then …
1. The ON AIR light at the door of my home office switches on:
2. A notification is displayed on LaMetric TIME:
3. The background led lights are switched on:
How does this work
It all starts with this little program, written by Stephan van Rooij: Teams monitor. This is a command line application that connects to the local Teams API and forwards the meeting status to any endpoint (you manage).
I put this program in the Windows startup folder, so it runs every time my laptop is switched on. His documentation includes detailed instructions how to integrate this with Home Assistant, using a toggle helper and a webhook trigger. This explains how the ON AIR light and led lights are switched on and off.
To send the notification to LaMetric TIME, the LaMetric integration of HA was used:
The ON AIR light box can be bought on Amazon. I bought the cheapest, and replaced the build-in light with a Zigbee led strip that I still had lying around.
Note: The LaMetric TIME is quite expensive. A cheaper solution is this Ulanzi smart pixel clock. How to flash it with new firmware and send notifications via HA is explained in this video.